seiyuu3

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After Nana-fying your OS, might as well Nana-fy your blog too, if only for 60 days (maybe they leave it up afterwards?).

For those unfamiliar, Kouhaku is NHK’s annual New Year’s eve music program. NHK is Japan’s biggest national broadcaster, and Kouhaku is traditionally an annual event for the typical Japanese folks, this is because unlike Westeners, the Japanese culturally spends New Year’s eve with their family at home and they then go to the shrine to pray etc.

Kouhaku used to have insane viewer ratings, the highest ever was some 80% in the Kanto area, so being on Kouhaku was a big deal for singers and like conducting a concert at Budoukan, is a holy grail for artists because that means you have proven yourself to be well known enough to qualify appearing on the show. However Kouhaku in the recent years had seen its ratings on the decline (still in the 40%, so still nothing to scoff at, more so if you know that most shows in Japan don’t get more than a double digit rating), a lot of the higher-ups were thinking that it is due to the younger generation abandoning TV watching in general so NHK had been pretty active in the last few years in trying to appeal more to the younger generation and otakus, such as the inclusion of some supposedly “Akiba idols” in 2007/8. This year, NHK had created a small team of “Digital Promoters” aiming to promote the program on the interwebs, and the members are celebrities Sekine Mari, Terry Itou, and our very own Mizuki Nana.

All 3 personalities will work together to promote the show via the show’s homepage on the web and mobile networks, but Nana-chan gets her own very special roles. Here’s what she would be doing:
1) Starting from November 1, a countdown clock blog part will be made available that features 60 (that’s right that’s a six-zero) pictures of Nana-chan. There will be voices too, everyday!
2) She would also be hosting a blog titled “Mizuki Nana – Kouhaku Blog” that will provide up to date information on the show

More official information can be found here.

In other words, Nana-chan is actually the biggest focus out of the three in the team, which is quite something. If nothing this would still greatly boost the exposure Nana-chan will get in the mainstream. And true enough nearly all major news sites had been using her name in the headlines. Heck you can see it in the PR event that she’s the one standing in the centre spot.

With how much Nana-chan had been doing for NHK this year (Music Japan narrator and appearance, now official Digital PR person for Kouhaku), all that’s left is that last annoucement of Nana-chan actually BE on Kouhaku. All of it looks to be very close to becoming a reality, and when that happens that would be the day all we Nanatards Nana-chan fans can celebrate and declare her to be the indisputable Queen of Seiyuu Artists.

Practically everyone and their PCs knows about Nana-chan’s involvement as Madobe Nanami with Windows 7, but she’s not the only one taking part in the launch of the OS. Here are some more Windows 7 launch events that involves seiyuu.

DOSPARA gets Furuya Touru (Amuro Ray) for their Wednesday night launch party. This is not the first time that Furuya had done PC related event as he had attended numerous Intel CPU launch parties in Akiba before. Apparently he is a PC builder himself too and even writes his own little programs, truely living up to his Amuro persona.

Softmap gets 3 seiyuu for their launch event on Thursday morning (weird time to have a launch event since its not a holiday, but I guess they are expecting NEETs): Imai Asami, Shiraishi Minoru and Yanase Natsumi. AFAIK Mingosu is a gamer but not a tech head, Minoru probably knows a bit about PCs but he’ll just wing the rest like he usually does, and I’ve got nothing personality wise on Yanase Natsumi. Very weird combination to say the least.

I wonder if they give out signed copies at these events. Signitures from any one of these guys would be infinitely better (to us seiyuu otas) than the Steve Ballmer signed copies they are giving away elsewhere.

So like Discotheque, the latest PV was leaked on the Internet again.

Unlike those crazy erojiji fangirls whom are suffering from dizzy-ness due to blood lost from the nose, let’s look at this PV and song objectively.

The first thing which strikes me about this song and PV is that feels like an act which a visual-kei J-rock band would do. With Nana’s continuing re-appearance at NHK’s Music Japan program (she’s going on for the third time in May) couple with the song that is veering away from the usual anisong image in the public’s mind, I think it’s fairly safe to say that she has set her sight firmly on the market outside her usual anime otaku fanbase and is testing waters with something that is a little more plateable on the mainstream scale (I don’t think it would be wrong for me to say that visual-kei J-rock is less on the extreme end of the mainstream spectrum than anisong). Who can blame her now that she is the indesputable top artist in the anisong sphere, there’s nowhere else for her to go except branching out as the otakusphere is only so big. That said, historically speaking, this sort of branching had all been fairly disastrous since technically speaking, mainstream and otaku taste simply don’t mix very well (which should be fairly obvious just by the very definition of these words alone), and catering to either one usually means the other will be alienated. So it remains to be seen how well Nana can balance her acts from now on.

As for the PV and song – Do I like it? It’s not bad, but I’m not quite as excited as the crazy erojiji fangirls. Does that mean my masculinity is in question? That or Nana is getting really good at turning girls gay.

Animelo 2009 RE:Bridge

I missed the livecast, but thanks to everyone’s live-spamming of this site (lol), I got to know the initial line-up for Animelo 2009 without even having to check the official site! User-generated content FTW? Anyway, with them going to the lengths of setting up an English site, I guess keeping up with this year’s line-up will be much simplier. Now just a summary of what artist we have thus far:

22nd August: Ayane, Ishikawa Chiaki, ELISA, JAM Project, Chihara Minori
23rd August: Sakakibara Yui, Savage Genius, Hirano Aya, Mizuki Nana, Yonekura Chihiro

It seems to me that Saturday currently lacks the 萌え idol seiyuu singers while Sunday is lacking the 燃え GAR/male singers. So I’m predicting that they will probably do something about that to balance the two days up in the upcoming annoucements. With Nana-chan and Hirano Aya both on Sunday (FWIW, they have gone head-to-head on the same day before when Aya appeared as special guest in 2007, though I guess most people had sealed that memory away due to that horrendous punk version of Bouken Desho Desho) it’s going to be a sell out for all the rabid fanboys and it would probably be just short of a riot when it comes to them fighting over tickets. If it is up to me I would think that they would do a temporary reunion of Yamato Nadeshiko (Yukarin and Hoc-chan) on Saturday to get the fanboys to step and craw over each others’ smelly bodies for Saturday’s session too. For GAR singers, well, I’m not that knowledgible in those, but I wouldn’t mind if they bring back GRANRODEO or something along that line. Oh and if m.o.v.e makes another appearance, please sing something else besides Gamble Rumble. You have an entire catalog of good Initial D theme songs, use them!

First iDOLM@STER Concert Tour

On other concert news, the iM@S girls are going to have their first ever concert tour in 4 major cities in May. The cities they are visiting are in the order of Nagoya, Osaka, Fukuoka and final stop at Tokyo. Appearance of the seiyuu are all over the place though from the initial announcements – like Takahashi Chiaki “Chiaking” only appearing at the Tokyo session and Shimoda Asami “Asapon” at Fukuoka only, plus the usual absence of Ochiai Yurika “Yurishii” and Kugimiya Rie “Kugyuu~”. Unless they change the line up it just means that it would be impossible to see to all the performances in one session. Someone made a reference guide for the line-up and I’ve just PS the English bits myself. While Tokyo looks the most delicious (as expected, and competition for tickets will be fierce), the lack of Asapon is going to be a real let down for me.

Nana-chan New Album on 20th May

So we now have a date, apparently it will contain 15 tracks, and the first press comes with a DVD of the secret event for Trickster which had Nana roping in a bunch of her other seiyuu friends such as Sugita Tomokazu, Suzumura Kenichi, Sawashiro Miyuki, and Kuwatani Natsuko and TEH Wakamoto (even though only as narration) did a play. I wonder if the epicness of the DVD will boost the sales even more by getting a few more sales from the fans of the other seiyuu?

Following closely to her getting number one spot on the Oricon Daily Singles chart with Shinai, Nana-chan now has another record to add to her list of musical achievements – this time for her Blu-ray disk set of the Live Fighter concert　”Live Fighter Blue X Red Side” being the first ever music related Blu-ray disk to have sold more than 10,000 copies in Japan (source).

While this is good news for Nana-chan and her fans, I think this says a lot more about the adaptation rate of Blu-ray in the general population and the condition of the music industry rather than the success of Nana-chan. If no other artists had sold more than 10,000 copies of their concerts or music clip Blu-rays up till now, if I was to be working for someone like SME or Avex I won’t be sleeping well at night that’s for sure.

While most will already know about the upcoming new album (Nana-chan said it should be coming out around May), the “one last thing” for today’s final concert at Budoukan was a summer concert at the Seibu Dome on 5th July this year.

While this is not THE Tokyo Dome we are talking about, it is a baseball dome revenue capable of seating some 36,000 people (Tokyo Dome holds 48,000) and one of the only two dome structures in and around the Tokyo area. This would very likely make Nana-chan the first seiyuu artist as well as anime song singer to have a dome scale concert.

Tokyo Dome and Kouhaku might really be just around the corner.

I uploaded my version without the letterbox – just because I can.

An acoustic version of this song will rock, maybe they’ll do one in the next concert tour. For the upcoming one, they need to get Agematsu Mika to come back and make epicness like last time.

I still haven’t seriously watched White Album, probably never will either.

Just announced yesterday on her official site, Nana-chan will be appearing NHK’s music program “Music Japan” sometime in Feburary. NHK are opening up draws for tickets to the recording of the program taking place on the 2nd Feburary. There’s some pretty big guns from mainstream Jpop artists there for this recording, most notably Koda Kumi is going to be there, so Nana-chan is going to be mixing it in with some fairly well known names.

More ever, and this is far from being an overstatement, she’s going to be charged with the duty to make some much needed good impressions for the Anisong genre as a whole on the general public. The last time NHK riding on the wave of general public interest towards Akiba cultural, they tried to pass off Shoko-tan, AKB48, and Leah Dizon as THE representatives of Akiba culture music during their annual Kouhaku program for 2007/08, which caused much uproar on 2ch whom were demanding true Anisong singers like KOTOKO, JAM Project, Sakamoto Maaya and Nana-chan should appear instead – and for once I can’t blame them either because not only were they extremely poor choices as representative of Akiba culture (only Shoko-tan sort of makes the cut, the other two are out of the question completely), their singing just don’t cut it either, even by seiyuu standards they are pretty bad. The last thing Anisong image needs are images of inferior quality catering to obsecure fetishes. Though with how experienced Nana-chan is at live events, it shouldn’t be a problem for her to make some impressions with her awesome vocals. Just hope that they choose a nice song (I’m thinking with how things are going right now, probably “Shin Ai” will be the number) and don’t get into all the moe talk and it should be ok.

Some people are also speculating that this is a move to pave way to get Nana-chan on Kouhaku this year. Who knows, maybe it will come true too, but it’s WAY too early to think about the end of 2009 right now.

The news is up on the official page, as reported both the Blu-ray and DVD version of Live Fighter are to be release on Christmas Day this year. The difference is that the Blu-ray box is going to be a 2 dual-layered disk set which contains *both* days of the Live Fighter concert in one package, while the DVD versions are split into two 2-disk set – each set covering the different days. The Blu-ray version will set you back 9450yen while the DVD version will cost 4200yen each. While the difference in total price is only 50yen, I think going for the Blu-ray version is going to be a no-brainer if you have the equipment for it such that you can enjoy watching Nana-chan’s legs in glorious HD as well as awesome surround sound (I’d presume they would offer 5.1 LPCM). Plus I guess shipping will be cheaper too for those not in Japan?

So reserve your Christmas present today and start saving!